Archive for May, 2019

To celebrate this, I am happy to make a little announcement: It is now possible to write in all the Wikipedias of all the languages of Africa, with all the special letters that are difficult to find on common keyboards. You can do it on any computer, without buying any new equipment, installing any software, or changing operating system preferences. Please see the full list of languages and instructions.

This release completes a pet project that I began a year ago: to make it easy to write in all the languages of Africa in which there is a Wikipedia or an active Wikipedia Incubator.

Most of these languages are written in the Latin alphabet, but with addition of many special letters such as Ŋ, Ɛ, Ɣ, and Ɔ, or letters with accents such as Ũ or Ẹ̀. These letters are hard to type on common keyboards, and in my meetings with African people who would write in Wikipedia in their language this is very often brought up as a barrier to writing confidently.

Some of these languages have keyboard layouts that are built into modern operating systems, but my experience showed me that to enable them one has to dig deep in the operating system preferences, which is difficult for many people, and even after enabling the right thing in the preferences, some keyboards are still wrong and hard to use. I hope that this will be built into future operating system releases in a more convenient way, just as it is for languages such as French or Russian, but in the mean time I provide this shortcut.

The new software released this week to all Wikimedia sites and to translatewiki.net makes it possible to type these special characters without installing any software or pressing any combining keys such as Ctrl or Alt. In most cases you simply need to press the tilde character (~) followed by the letter that is similar to the one you want to type. For example:

Ɓ is written using ~B

Ɛ is written using ~E

Ɔ is written using ~O
… and so on.

Some of these languages are written in their own unique writing systems. N’Ko and Vai keyboards were made by myself, mostly based on ideas from freely licensed keyboard layouts by Keyman. (A keyboard for the Amharic language, also written with its own script, has had keyboards made by User:Elfalem for a while. I am mentioning it here for completeness.)

This release addresses only laptop and desktop computers. On mobile phones and tablets most of these languages can be typed using apps such as Gboard (also in iPhone), SwiftKey (also on iPhone), or African Keyboard. If you aren’t doing this already, try these apps on your phone, and start exchanging messages with your friends and family in your language, and writing in Wikipedia in your language on your phone! If you are having difficulties doing this, please contact me and I’ll do my best to help.

Mahuton Possoupe (Benin), with whom I made the first of these keyboards, for the Fon language, at the Barcelona Hackathon.

Kartik Mistry, Santhosh Thottingal (India), Niklas Laxström (Finland), and Petar Petkovich (Serbia), who reviewed the numerous code patches that I made for this project.

This is quite a big release or code. While I made quite a lot of effort to test everything, code may always have bugs: missing languages, wrong or missing letters, mistakes in documentation, and so on. I’ll be happy to hear any feedback and to fix the bugs.

And now it’s all up to you! I hope that these keyboard layouts make it easier for all of you, African Wikimedians, to write in your languages, to write and translate articles, and share more knowledge!

Again, happy Africa day!

The full list of languages for which there is now a keyboard in ULS and jquery.ime: